


Emotion

by starcunning



Series: Bite of the Black Wolf [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Colette de Dzemael, Dirty Talk, Elezen Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), F/M, FFXIV 5.0, NSFW, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Pregnant Sex, Teasing, twinsverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:54:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23235058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starcunning/pseuds/starcunning
Summary: But there was no urgency in him now, only the simple desire for closeness.For intimacy.The very word stilled him a moment, tightened his grasp against her thigh. It was not every day he could turn his golden eyes upon something and find it staring back at him unfazed, but to put a name to this need was similarly unsettling.
Relationships: Gaius van Baelsar/Warrior of Light
Series: Bite of the Black Wolf [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1670509
Kudos: 31





	Emotion

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seraphicrose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphicrose/gifts).



> Originally written (never widely released) 10 October 2019.

He woke with a start to dark and quiet. There was no sound from the mattress, only a subtle shift of weight, and all at once Gaius remembered why his surroundings were so strange.

He had been accustomed to some small comfort in his cabin aboard the  _ Aurelia _ , and in his suites in Ala Mhigo, but his rack in the Praetorium had been standard; he hadn’t intended to stay there overlong. He certainly hadn’t intended for the place to be destroyed by Ascian machinations—nor the same fate to befall him. So he had survived. He had been destroyed just the same, and spent the years that followed with a bedroll—if he were lucky. And now he slept on a feather bed and woke at nothing.

Colette rolled onto her side, shifting and settling. A blanket was loosely draped over her shoulders, and he reached out to tug it into place, straightening a fold so that it covered her back. Her tattoo—so stark against her pale skin—was muted to a whisper of shadows, barely glimpsed beneath the spill of her hair. She murmured and turned her head to regard him over her shoulder.

“I thought you were asleep,” she said into the darkness.

“I was,” Gaius said.

“Sorry,” she said. “I got cold.”

He slipped a hand under the blanket to touch her hip. The sweat of earlier had cooled on his skin, and Gaius found that he, too, was a bit chilly. It was summer, but Dravania was mountainous and elevated enough to feel it mildly—though more prominently, at least, than Garlemald. He rolled onto his side then, and plucked up the corner of the blanket once more to pull it further back, wrapping the pair of them together.

She kicked lightly at his shins. “Get your own blanket,” she said, amusement in her tone outweighing her annoyance.

“My apologies, my lady,” he drawled. “I merely thought I could be of some service in warming you up.”

“‘Warming me up,’” she said. As skeptical as she sounded, she still shifted her weight, wriggling back against him. “I know what you’re about, you old dog.”

Gaius chuckled, arranging the blankets around them. He slipped one arm beneath her pillow, and pulled her back against his chest. Her hair tickled at his chin and throat, all the way down to the top of his chest. It had always been soft, but as he buried his nose in it to breathe in the scent of roses, he found it softer still than he remembered. He slipped his arm around her again, his hand settling at her hip for just a moment, then skimming over the swell of her stomach.

Despite her protestations, Colette arched and shifted, leaning back against him so that his bare skin pressed to hers. Her skin was taut but soft, the lambs-wool serum she rubbed into it every night still faintly tacky.

It was his child she was carrying—children, if her suspicions were correct, and given how heavy she’d grown with it already he found little reason to doubt her. There were times the realization laid strange across his shoulders: it was rather late in life to come to fatherhood, Cid and Livia notwithstanding. Given the ends they had come to, he had decided some time before that perhaps it was for the best that his career had precluded starting a family of the more traditional sort.

Perhaps Gaius van Baelsar truly had died in the Praetorium, then, and he was someone else now that laid beside this woman; the mother of his children and the wife of his heart, even if not on paper. Her hand settled atop his, and pressed his fingers more firmly against her skin. Little enough he could do for that particular ache, but he ran his hand over the swell just the same, hoping at least to distract her. She shook her head and her soft hair cascaded over his cheeks, overwhelming him with its gentle fragrance. Gaius nuzzled through it to kiss at the nape of her neck, and she whined.

“You must be at the edge of the bed,” she grumbled. “I’m so huge.”

“No,” Gaius said, which was true enough; there was perhaps a hand-span of mattress left behind him. He buried his face against her shoulder, a few days’ growth of stubble rasping against her skin. Over her soft gasp, he said, “You’re gorgeous.”

“I don’t feel gorgeous,” she said. “I feel like I want to just go float in the river for the next five moons until this is over.”

Gaius laughed, and he could feel his own breath, hot and damp, rushing over her skin. “I could carry you to the bath instead,” he offered. “We could get in together …”

“I’m certain you have no agenda in the offering,” she said. Her own laughter was light as birdsong in the dark room.

In the dim he could tell no difference between his skin and hers, when during the day it was so obvious. The shadows were so deep and the distant moon so wan that it became hard to see the boundaries between their being. Gaius traced a hand upward over her side, stomach to ribs to the outside curve of one heavy breast. Colette murmured softly in reply. “None at all,” he assured her, the tip of his nose tracing the curve of her elegant neck. His lips found her ear a moment later. “Well, except the pleasure of washing you …

“I’d start with the back, I think,” he said, bowing his own body to pull his chest away a moment. His hand swept her hair aside, brushing it forward over her shoulder so that he wouldn’t pull it on accident. Only purposefully—and not at that moment, his rough fingers tracing the curve of her back. He could feel the tension in her muscles, and laid a hand against her, the joint of his thumb pressing slow circles just to the side of her spine. Colette groaned a little, and he pressed harder, working deeper tissue, from the dimples just above the curve of her back and upward. It was not a gentle touch, but she melted under it, stretching one leg out and rolling her hips so that she laid halfway between side and stomach, the blanket pooled around her waist and pulled up over the front of her body.

“Shoulders and arms next,” he said. She stretched an arm behind herself, pulling herself back up onto her side and him against her once more, the curve of her ass pressed against his groin. He could feel himself stirring. No doubt she did too, because she waggled her hips a little. His hand closed over her shoulder, and he skimmed his fingers forward, rubbing at her collarbone with a light touch. He let his breath skate over her cheek, her ear, stirring through her hair, simply holding her by the shoulder as she arched and ground against him. Her fingernails pricked at his bare hip, and he could feel the trembling of her hands. Gaius slid his palm down over her bicep, past the elbow and along the forearm. He lifted her wrist, and then intertwined his fingers with her own. Caught in his grasp, her delicate arm enfolded by his muscular one, he reached forward, slipping their hands under the blanket. Her palm touched her own body, her fingers and nails tracing her own skin. Hip to stomach they went, and upward still further until they brushed the underside of one breast. Gaius molded her fingers to her own body there, his thumb and hers grazing one nipple. Colette groaned, lifting her chin to press her head back against him.

He slipped his arm out from under the pillow so that he could bend it, laying his forearm along her collarbone. His hand grasped her shoulder lightly, holding her in place against him. The other slipped free of hers, running his fingers over the swell of her stomach and coming to rest at her hip. She pressed back against him, groaning to find him half-hard, but Gaius did not deign to acknowledge it.

“What after that?” he mused.

“Gaius, please,” Colette said, whining.

His smile went unseen in the darkness, pressed against the curve of her shoulder. “Legs seem the most likely,” he said. His hand slid along the outside of her thigh even as she tried to hook her knee behind his. He could feel the softness of her body there, stroking from hip to knee and then back upward again. Another little whimper escaped her, and he relented, splaying his palm over the front of her thigh, a firmer touch engendered as he rubbed at her skin, grinding the heel of his palm against her. He let his hand rest at the top of her leg, tracing idle patterns along the inside of her thigh with his thumb.

“Please,” she repeated. “Please touch me.”

In the dim he could see her fondling herself, her elegant fingers kneading at her breast, pinching and tugging at her nipples. It made his breath catch in his throat, but he smothered the sound, and waited until his voice was steady to say, “No.” A little cry escaped her, one of defeat and frustration. “But if I did,” Gaius continued, bending his mouth to her ear, “where would I start?” There were so many options, after all. He squeezed her back against him with his arm around her shoulders, and his other hand slid up to her hip once more. In this way he anchored her against him, so that he could feel every shiver that slid up her spine; even the rise and fall of her quickening breath. He would not simply do as she bid—or at least not yet.

“Are you sensitive?” he asked, knowing full well the answer.

“Yes,” Colette whimpered.

“Perhaps your breasts then,” he said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, me palming them?” Her little murmur was an answer all its own, so he continued, “I could pinch your nipples.”

“Yes.”

“Or suck on them.”

“Please …” Colette shifted in his grasp. Her arm brushed against the back of his hand.

“Colette,” he said, reaching down to take hold of her wrist.

“If you’re not going to,” she said, “someone should.”

Gaius laughed, pulling her hand back up to her hip and covering it with his own. “Not you,” he told her.

“Bastard,” she said, her laughter breathless.

He turned his head to kiss her shoulder, opening his mouth to bite at her skin lightly. “Maybe so,” he said. “It does not change the fact that you want this bastard’s mouth on you, sucking so hard it’s  _ almost _ painful.” She shuddered against him, and he could feel her squirm. It ground her ass against his erection—that too was so hard it almost hurt. “I want to taste your milk,” he said.

“Gaius,” she gasped. “Please fuck me.”

“Already?” He growled against her skin. “But I’ve barely begun. I’ve yet to even touch you below the waist in this hypothetical.”

“Well, hurry up!”

He let out a thoughtful hum, drumming his fingers against her skin. “No,” he said. “Perhaps I would lift my mouth to your neck then, to kiss you there instead. To feel the way you gasp. To bite at your skin.”

Colette groaned. “Marking territory?” She wriggled against him, her thighs tensing as though she had some hope of getting herself off, grinding against nothing.

Gaius lifted a hand to brush her hair back once more, baring her neck to his teeth. “No need,” he murmured against her. “I wrote my name inside you some time ago.” He could hear the whisper of skin against skin, and traced the lay of her arm to find her hand cupping her belly. Gaius splayed his fingers over her too.

“By the Fury,” she moaned. “I don’t know if I want you to stop or keep going.”

“Why would you want me to stop?” Gaius asked.

“Because I want you inside me already!”

He felt himself surge, cock twitching with arousal. He put the thought from him, mastering it to say instead, “I think my hand between your legs would serve just as well.”

“Any other night, yes,” she said, and he could feel the tension in her limbs already. “But right now, I really, really need you.”

Gaius closed his eyes. It made little enough difference; his spatial sense told him almost as much as his regular vision about where she was in relation to him, and he could feel the warmth of her body and the softness of her skin. Still, he took a breath to steady himself, sliding his hand down her leg to press just behind her knee. “Alright,” he said, and she bent her legs.

He shifted a bit, moving further down the bed so that he could enter her more easily. He didn’t, though, not yet, though he reached down to take hold of the base of his cock. When he pressed against her, his length slid along her folds, and she drenched him in her honey, soft murmurs escaping her distant lips. Gaius groaned himself, working his hips lightly to rub the head of him against her clit. She whimpered, and he watched her silhouette change, slipping a hand between her legs. Her fingers brushed the corona of his prick, drawing another grunt of pleasure from him, and he pulled back to grind against her vulva instead.

He entered her so slowly and so shallowly at first that it was almost a surprise to find himself there, his legs bent to press taut thighs against soft ones. The arm trapped beneath their bodies had slipped free, and he skimmed his hand up her aching back to grasp her shoulder lightly, using that purchase to pull himself up against her. Then he allowed himself to rest there a moment, feeling the heat of her need smother his prick. His hand got lost in her hair, stroking the pale strands and letting them fall back to the bed, pale as the little moonlight that touched the room at this hour.

When he moved it was much more slowly than was his usual wont—certainly it was gentle compared to earlier that night, when he had stood at the foot of the bed and entered her from behind. She had needed that passion then, and he had needed to give vent to his just the same. But there was no urgency in him now, only the simple desire for closeness.

For intimacy.

The very word stilled him a moment, tightened his grasp against her thigh. It was not every day he could turn his golden eyes upon something and find it staring back at him unfazed, but to put a name to this need was similarly unsettling.

“Colette,” he said.

She whimpered in response, some mewling sound that was meant to be his name. If he wanted to, he could focus on that, convince himself this was a coupling like half a hundred others—like so many with her, in point of fact. But even those … he had been pretending for a long time that this was meaningless. The truth was far more dangerous, and far closer to home: this had come to mean something to him long before he had slipped that lover’s token into her pack like a coward.

Gaius wrapped himself around her, their legs splayed forward, hips tipped in such a way that it was easy for him to press into her. He could feel her fingers rubbing slow circles against her clit, her nails lightly grazing the delicate skin of his testes now and again. One hand clutched at her shoulder, her hair spilled over his arm, and the other swept up over her side to take one breast in hand. He bent his mouth to her back, longing to drown in her.

They weren’t even thrusts, not really—only the shallow roll of his hips against hers, feeling the plushness of her as he ground against her ass. But they were more than enough to make her moan, though perhaps that was down to her own touch. Or his, as he palmed her breast, feeling her nipple pucker against his palm. He wanted to put his mouth on her, to bow himself over her and suckle at her until she whimpered and writhed, but from his position that was an impossibility. Instead he pressed his mouth against her back, kissing at her and letting his stubble rasp against her soft skin. He caught her nipple between two fingers and gave it a pinch. She fluttered around him, a little whimper squeezed from her. It grew into a moan as he tugged, and then splayed his hands across her breast once more, crushing it back against his chest.

He was nowhere near as deep inside her as he had been before, and yet he felt closer still than ever. Perhaps it was enough—and more than enough—simply to feel her writhe and clench, to hear her breath leave her in shuddering sighs. He could smell her perfume on her skin and on the sheets and her need smeared over him, and beneath the hand that still fondled her he could feel the swell of her stomach, heavy with his own get. It felt like nothing he had ever known, and all his careful planning could never have prepared him for this.

Gaius murmured her name once more, and she arched and pressed back against him, trying to take him as deeply as she could in that position. “Colette,” he said again, practically a growl.

“Gaius, please,” she whimpered.

“Please  _ what, _ ” he wondered, tugging sharply at her nipple.

She yelped, and he felt her go tense against him, squeezing at him, smothering his cock. “Again.”

He obliged her, catching the taut peak of her nipple between thumb and the side of one finger, rubbing it in a slow circle. She rewarded him with another whine, her fingers twitching between her legs in an echo of that selfsame motion. His hand tightened on her shoulder, pressing their bodies together still tighter, and he could feel his panting breaths clinging to her skin, making it damp—little as she needed the help, a faint sheen of sweat breaking out over her body.

He did not need to urge her, nor order her; all he needed to do was to touch her. To kiss her and pull her body flush against his; to feel her touch herself. Colette whimpered, reaching back with the hand beneath herself to grasp at him, her fingers buried in his unruly hair. As though Gaius had the slightest inkling of lifting his mouth from her. He felt her shudder, clasp at him, a thready moan spilling from her in anticipation, and then she spent, shivering. His own release was sweet and slow as their coupling, a weight giving way to a welcome emptiness; a warmth that pervaded without and within.

He laid there wrapped around her, slack and spent and satiated, nuzzling against her back. “Never doubt that I find you beautiful,” he said. “In Garlemald, it is held that a woman is never more beautiful than when she is with child. Having never been made a father this way before, I did not understand before.”

When she shuddered next he thought for a moment it was simply a pleasurable aftershock. But listening more closely, her whimpers had taken on a different timbre. He lifted a hand to brush back her hair. Then he touched her cheek, and found it wet with tears.

Gaius slipped from her so that he could drag himself back up the bed and hold her shuddering body against his, touch gentle and breath even, as though he could by example calm her. “What’s wrong, Colette?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she sobbed.

For a moment that frustrated him—had he but known the problem he could have attacked it with all his usual ferocity. “Do you not believe me?” he wondered, voice low and even.

“No,” she said, sniffling. “No, I do, but … what about after?” she said.

Gaius considered this a moment, kissing the crown of her head. “Then I suppose I will discover how beautiful you are as a mother,” he said.

“But after I give you what you want …” Colette trailed off. Gaius wound his arms around her, and felt her pillow soaked with tears. “What reason then would you have to remain here? This life cannot satisfy you; you who nearly spent your life’s blood in the imperial palace.”

“I had not known then what I know now,” he said. “Perhaps I can no more cease to be a soldier than you may put aside the mantle of ‘Warrior of Light.’ However.” Gaius sighed, letting his hand wander over her side. “What has that life cost me? My children—those I adopted, and those I never permitted myself to have in favor of my career.”

“If you wanted them, you could have had them long before now,” Colette said. Her breathing was slower, becoming more even. “Why me?”

Gaius laughed. “Perhaps I should begin to believe in fate after all,” he said. “We both know this was not in my plans. I would never have allowed myself that. That does not mean I am any less glad that it is happening.”

“But why me?” she reiterated, something plaintive in her voice.

“Because I love you,” said Gaius. “Is that not reason enough?”

Colette sighed, reaching back to grasp his hip as though afraid he might pull away. “It has not always been,” she said. “My sister loves me, and is far beyond my reach to speak to now. And others …” She shook her head, her hair tickling at his chest. “Once you have what you want of me, you have no reason to remain shackled to me.”

“What I want of you,” Gaius said, “is everything.” He considered for a moment, and shook his head. “Your very presence,” he said then. “And to abandon you as you so fear would rob me of that which I crave most.”

“Promise me,” she said.

“I have already so pledged myself,” Gaius told her. “But I will promise again now that I have no intention of leaving you.”

Another sigh escaped her, but there was a sense of relief in it, her body slack and cooling against his. Gaius reached down for the blanket that pooled around their ankles, kicked off in the heat of their passion and now become needful again. He arranged it about her once more, and then laid there with her, back to chest. In the darkness of the night and beneath the shroud of their blanket, it was impossible to tell where he ended and she began.


End file.
